


Remember me

by thiefofbluefire



Category: Original Work, Rockman | Mega Man - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Light Angst, Male Friendship, Memory Related, Mystery, POV First Person, Time Skips, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:02:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21865099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thiefofbluefire/pseuds/thiefofbluefire
Summary: My past is your future.I will be on my deathbed when you're learning how to crawl, and the last thing you see before you pass away will be my birth.But one day, in between all of that, we will be the same age.And that day, we will be friends.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	1. Took a wrong turn

The first time I met the meddler, he was the metaphorical master, and I was the one wandering, lost, in need of guidance.

"Another world?"

"Yeah." The meddler tells me over dinosaur shaped waffles. "Not just the one that you stumbled into either. There's lots of dimensions parallel to your own. I say parallel, but don't get it wrong, not of these timelines are actually straight, so every so often, a couple of them intersect."

He demonstrates by lathering a knife with peanut butter and dragging it in a zig zag across the T-Rex face on his plate, then drizzling maple syrup next to it in a squiggle so that they could mix.

"Time is like squiggly lines is what you're telling me?" I ask with an eyebrow raised.

Most multiverse theories are absurd, but considering that a man with only eight minutes of freedom at a time is treating me to breakfast at a zoo filled with dinosaurs that I can't for the life of me remember how the hell we got here, I suppose I need to approach the subject with an open mind.

"You must be fun at parties." He chuckles.

"I don't go to parties." I tell him. "Never been my scene."

"Never?" He says, shovelling a huge, peanut buttery piece of waffle into his mouth. Lordy, that can't be healthy. "Boy, you gotta make some friends."

"Friends..." I mutter, looking down.

"What? Something on my face?" He asks me.

I look up at him as he chipmonk chews down the food and swallows it with a smack of his lips.

"No." I answer honestly, since there really isn't anything on his face that wasn't already there. But then I get back on topic.  
"The closest thing I've ever had to friends was my boss, who was miserable and I had to put him down, my protoge, who went against what I wanted and..." I feel myself grimace. "She's still making up for her mistake, and my sister, who..." I shake my head. The memory of her face brings with it a familiar pain that I don't want to think about.

"If it's all the same to you, I don't think friends are going to be necessary in this endeavor." I tell the meddler as he puts down his fork.  
He wets his lips and dabs a napkin around the corners of his mouth before he leans forward.

"... Tell me, do you know what a friend really is?" He asks, concerned and completely serious.

It's so far removed from his usual weird, wacky persona, and the shift in his tone kind of takes me off guard. Maybe it shows on my face, but I try to respond in kind.

"... Someone I am close to, who doesn't count as family or whom I have a sexual relationship with." I answer plainly. "Why do you ask?"

"That's true," he sighs more than he says. "But going by that definition, that means that we're friends. And we just met."  
He points to himself and me to punctuate his point, still serious.

"No," I say, still a little jarred by his tone. "You and I are aquatinted. Still basically strangers, but I know your name, and you know mine."

"Meddler isn't my name, but not the point." He mutters with a hand rubbing the back of his neck. "The point is, you've probably never really had a friend before if you're only working with that rigid, textbook definition."

I feel like there's a punchline that he's building up to, maybe a pun that I can steal and use on someone unsuspecting for a good laugh later. So I roll my eyes and brace for it.

"Then what do you define as a friend, meddler?" I ask.

The pun doesn't come.

"A friend is someone who, against all odds, remembers." The meddler says with no humor, his index finger pointing straight up.

"... Remembers what?" I ask, confused.

His prosthetic finger points down at me.

"You."

I may have been feeling a bit of enthusiasm waiting for a joke, so I deflate realizing that he's legitimately being serious about this.

"Really?" I ask, about to poke at his point. "Lots of people can remember-"

"Yeah lots of people can," he interrupts me. "But very few people actually do. And when you're a time traveller, that number's smaller than usual."

"But people remember the names of historical figures," I point out, coming up with a few noteworthy presidents and religious leaders that I've never seen in person, even with the time skimmer. "Even the ones that died centuries before they were born. How can you be friends with someone just by remembering their name? What about if you've never met them in person?"

"Notable men and women of history are remembered only because history Wants to remember them." He explains. "Because they had friends that wanted history to remember them. Friends who remembered their name, wrote it down, told it to everyone they knew, and told them to write it down and remember it too."

He closes his eyes and shakes his head.

"But that's the thing about time travel. The moment you break from the flow of history, she doesn't want to remember you anymore. And she'll actively make sure everyone else forgets you too. Believe me, anyone who goes down in history as a time traveller is either the best time traveller that ever lived, or the worst."

He says it mournfully. Which is also just not like him at all.

"What about the people who went down as the villains of history?" I ask because it occurred to me that history makes note of both sides. "Whose names are remembered with distain and muttered with disgust."

"Did I stutter?" He asks rhetorically with a raised eyebrow. "You remember your friends, not your enemies."

He picks up the fork again and starts poking around at the waffle's crispy edges.

"Just because you're friends with someone, doesn't mean you're friendly to them." He says with a semi-mischevious smile. "Doesn't mean you guys even like each other. You could utterly hate each other's guts and still be friends."

The conflicting definitions of friend and foe cross my mind. His argument isn't computing.

"That doesn't make sense-" I try to tell him, but he cuts me off again.

"Think about it. If he knows your name, that means he's thought about it." He taps a finger against his temple.  
"Means he Still thinks about it. He could be a right bastard, but you know what? If he's taken the time and energy to give the finger to whatever force controls the time space continuum and remember that your name means *you*?" He says, pointing to me with his pinky. "That your name means you exist? I hate to tell you, Over, but that bastard will always be your friend."

That bastard will always be your friend.

The phrase repeats itself in my head as someone approaches from behind me.

"Jack." Says a posh voice that has a dangerous point to it.

I jump and turn around, greeted by a stern young man in a purple three piece suit with bright green accents, a fedora on his head, a pocket watch in one hand, a sawed off rifle in the other.  
If I had to guess, I'd wager that he's somewhere in his mid to late twenties, thirty years at the oldest.  
His face is the picture of, "I'm not getting paid enough to deal with this," and while I'm sympathetic to that kind of attitude, it's seriously off putting on him for some reason.

"Speak of the devil," the meddler chuckles, back to his usual self. "Lance ol boy, got some leftovers here!"

"Who is this?" Lance asks, giving me the side eye as he steps around to hover over the meddler like a craven bird, which I honestly don't appreciate.

"An up and coming time traveller that accidentally wandered into another dimension," the meddler answers casually as he snatches the watch out of Lance's hand and replaces it with a fork. "I'm trying to corrupt him."

"You're doing no such thing," I chide, because he isn't.

"I said trying, not succeeding," he says with a wink and a smirk my way before he looks down at the watch. Mild disappointment pulls down his smile and he clicks it closed, offering it back to Lance.  
"Well I gotta go then, don't I?"

"Indeed, Jack," Lance answers automatically, juggling the fork and watch between his fingers, and before I know it, the watch is snug in his waistcoat pocket and he's nibbling on a syrupy piece of waffle.

I shake off the lack of visual cohesion that just happened in front of me and instead latch onto the name that Lance keeps saying.

"Jack?" I ask, and the meddler gives me a cheeky tilt of the chin.  
"As in, J-A-C-K? That's your name?" I reiterate.

It's a remarkably plain name that doesn't really suit the meddler. I don't think so, at least.

"Actually, it's J-A-Q," he corrects me without bite, waggling a metal finger.

Jaq? Odd choice of spelling.... Unless it's meant to invoke the French spelling and pronunciation?

"As in, Jaques?" I ask as he stands up, pushes in his chair and pulls a holographic tablet out of nowhere.

"Sure," he shrugs, handing it to me. "But if that's too confusing, meddler works just fine."

I take the tablet and scrunch my face at the way he phrased that.

Why would Jaques, and by extension, Jaq, be confusing?

Before I can ask, the meddler snaps his fingers to get my attention. As I adress him and his company, he gives a smile, another wink, and a thumbs up before pointing to the sky. I glance up at where he's pointing, and I see the wings of several massive pterosaurs flying overhead towards the rest of the park.

The abrupt reminder that I'm in a zoo of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals renews it's novelty with the sight and I feel my jaw hang open with a particular lightness in my chest as I watch them soar.

The meddler chuckles at the, no doubt, dumbstruck look on my face. I look back at him, some zinger about him shutting up cause 'that's just cool' on my tongue, but it never leaves my mouth.  
He affixes me with a pinched look of nostalgia that pins my light, venerable self to an invisible weight I haven't felt since I read that last letter from my boss.

His eyes are lightly lidded with slight creases at the edges, signaling happiness. Contrasted by the downward tilt of his brows, suggesting concern.  
His smile is small and sad, but the way it flows into the laugh lines around his nose means that it's real, unlike the exaggerated, toothy grins and cheeky smirks he'd been giving me earlier.

The weight pangs my chest and I make the mistake of blinking.  
In one instant, the meddler is there, the next, he's gone, leaving me with the tablet, the map on it that I needed in the first place, and that expression burned into my conscience.

"Jaq, huh?" I mutter, looking down at the tablet, reading it's legend.

"You'd do well to forget that," Lance says stiffly as he puts the fork on the, now empty, plate where the meddler sat. "Association with him will bring you nothing but trouble."

I frown and clear my throat.

"I'm not afraid of trouble, good sir," I add condescendingly. "So you let me worry about what I get myself into."

Lance disappears out of my perepheral vision with a huff and a bit of hesitation. To hell with him anyway.

That bastard will always be your friend.

"Well. Damn."


	2. And turned it back around.

The second time I met the meddler, we weren't the same people.

Fourteen hours into what the world would know as the "Eurasia incident" left me scouring the deathly quiet streets of Denver for supplies.  
This high above sea level and in a completely different hemisphere should have been comfort enough to the humans here that Eurasia wouldn't be able to touch them, but the word of a news anchor on a sketchy network wasn't as reassuring as the foundation built on giant springs and over 200 feet of concrete and mountain between civilian and atmosphere that NORAD offered when calls for mass evacuation were made. Though, considering the distance between Denver and NORAD, it's funny just how many people would rather drive between four and fourteen hours for their safety than stay home and watch the fireworks.

I mean that facetiously, of course. But without any humans around, the quiet is an easy fuel for dread.  
There's no real danger, Maverick Hunters had swept through this area hours ago to eliminate any infected reploids and to evacuate stragglers who couldn't catch the bus.   
All that was left were the stray animals, the occasional looter, and the ghosts.  
The rattling of metal doors on shops, the half visible specters in windows, the automated roller coasters running by themselves over a kilometer away from me, and yet I can still hear their rickety, turning wheels.

The rain doesn't help much. It runs down my face and makes the jumpsuit I'm wearing under my armor suck and catch on the tiny crevasses between my joints, so I'm already uncomfortable and on edge when I hear a thump, a yelp and a splash across the street behind me. 

I turn around with my buster drawn, expecting it to be anything between a lost dog or a shambling 'roid with a club looking for someone to swing it at.

Instead, I see a silhouette I'm familiar with ankle deep in a puddle cursing his reflection in the glass window of a shop.

"Piece of crap, malfunctioning compass!" He yells with a fist in the air.

It's pitch is incrementally higher than I remember, but I do recognize that voice.

It's been years.

I put my buster onto standby and cup a hand near my mouth before I call out to him.

"Hey! Jaq!" I bark out quickly.

"Huh?!" Is his surprised reply as he reels around, shaggy hair smacking his face.

"Jaq with a q!" I reiterate, beckoning him with my hands. "As in Jaques? Come on before you freeze out here, meddler!"

Not that it was particularly cold to me, but organic life, Colorado night temperatures, excessive amounts of moisture, and no professional help for miles didn't mix well. There's a parking garage not too far from here, so getting the hell out of the rain would be a deal I'll wager even the meddler wouldn't refuse.

He sees me and I can tell that his eyes light up. I tuck away my buster and begin leading him towards the abandoned public parking building as soon as he comes within a ten foot radius of me.

We're both panting and shaking like dogs after a fight with a sprinkler when we get under the cover provided by the wide open entrance, and I give him a proper look over now that I can see him more clearly.

Unruly brown hair, bright green eyes, armor that's similar to what people on this world use, but just not quite.  
An uncanny entity, too human to be a reploid, but not actually human enough to qualify for insurance benefits.

Such is the mark of a time traveller.

"How'd you know that was my name?" Jaq asks once he's found his breath.

I feel my heart sink a little and look him up and down again.  
If memory serves me right, which it usually does, the last time I saw him there were a couple more nicks and dents in his armor. Not only that, but the meddler didn't have shoulder pauldrons like he does now. 

'In fact,' I realize with a blink that the meddler I met had an entirely prosthetic right arm, and that the only reason I knew that is because he didn't have it covered by anything except a bracer that was part of his armor ensemble. Tonight, he was dressed symmetrically, the only indication of that false arm being an unnatural green glow coming from the palm. Everything from the wrist up was covered.

I scanned over his face and saw him looking me up and down with a degree of fascination and awe, lingering on the details of my suit and my shiny white setup the way a kid looks at a new action figure.

The way you look at a stranger.

"Lots of people know my name," the time traveller elaborates. "But only other time travellers call me the meddler, and even fewer of those know or care that my real name is specifically spelled J-A-Q. How do you know that?"

I clench my jaw and try to think of something to do with my hands.

He doesn't recognize me.

How do I respond to that kind of question?

He doesn't recognize me.

I thought the higher voice was because he was yelling out angrily. But no. His voice isn't the same because he isn't the same.

He doesn't recognize me.

Would there be a point to telling him what I remember?

He doesn't recognize me because there's nothing for him to recognize because he doesn't know who I am because he's a young man and  
he  
hasn't  
met  
me

until now.

Is this what that nostalgic look back then was for?

I cross my arms and lean on my right foot.  
'First impressions are important,' I tell myself as I swallow some of that sudden ache.  
I find it hard to keep a stiff upper lip, but once I annunciate the first word, the rest is a bitter piece of cake.

"You're smart, you'll figure it out," and he seems to accept that as answer enough. "You lost?"

"Yeah, actually," he replies, sheepishly looking down before springing back up, exasperated. "Just typical too, I'm a map maker and I always manage to get myself lost!"

I suppose that is ironic.

"Well, isn't it the job of the guy making the map to get lost so the guy reading it doesn't?" I ask, deciding to keep cool.

"That's a good way to put it, but the the guy won't get a map to read at all if the cartographer never finishes it because he keeps getting lost!" He counters, animatedly throwing his hands above his head with wide, crazy eyes.

It's almost cute, his frustration, and I feel a smile pull at the corners of my mouth.

"I guess that's true," I concede, since he does make a valid point. "I know the area, maybe I can point you in the right direction?"

Helping a friend couldn't hurt.

"If you could, I'd appreciate it," Jaq sighs with relief before he offers his right hand out. The glowing palm conjures a projection outlining the city in green with a turquoise path slithering around alleyways and cutting through buildings, stopping abruptly in the middle of the road.

"See, I'm trying to find something called..." His face falls and he works his jaw trying to explain. "Well, it doesn't have a name, per say, but it's a fold in between the dimensional confines."

The projection switches to an animation of a hole in the air that warbles, grows, and shrinks inconsistently. Markers pointing to the animation rattle off data written in French, and while I'm out of practice, I do make out "relative position" and "garblesnatch" I think before the meddler continues.

"I know that time travellers can use it to travel between dimensions safely, but I also know that finding things like it requires way too much luck," my least favorite word. "And I'd like to give someone less experienced something more reliable than that."

The animation switches again to text and glyphs that I can't understand as they scroll upwards like a credit roll in a movie.

"It's somewhere around here," Jaq mutters, squinting at the data like it barely makes sense to him either. "My sources suggest something about a... playground with a clock post that's always on time... except when it's noon or midnight."

He looks at me through the hologram.

"Do you know it?"

"Playground" and "clock post" bring up several options when I plug them in as key phrases in my location search, which helps, why wouldn't it, but the detail that the clock apparently is never on time at noon or midnight throws me for a loop.

I mean, how would that work? Does the clock linger on 11:59 for two minutes then rapidly switch to 12:01 when midday/night passes? Or does it skip 12:00 altogether and pause on 12:01 for an extra minute?

Or better yet, why would a clock that's otherwise on time make the 12 on it's face the exception?

The obvious answer with the context of what the meddler is looking for is that the 'fold' is preventing the clock from acknowledging midnight and noon respectively. But while it makes sense enough on it's own, that explanation doesn't feel like the right one. It's quirky the way time travel is, but it's also shallow in how it doesn't actually say anything about itself.

Time Means something. As a result, time anomalies always Say something, be it about the time they were created in, or about the time that could have been, but was lost.

"... Oh," I realize as the lightbulb in my head clicks on. "The memorial clock by the elementary school." I drop my hands and set coordinates in my mind's map. "It's not far, I can show you, but we'll have to be quick and careful."

After all, the Eurasia incident is still in full swing, and I can't afford to get too sidetracked.

I still have my mission.

Jaq puts away the fancy light show and bounces on the balls of his feet with an enthusiastic grin.

"As my girl always says, 'Jaq be nimble, Jaq be quick!'" he recites as we both charge back out into the rain.

Well that's not something the meddler ever said before.

"You have a girlfriend back home?" I ask while it's still relevant, chancing a look at him behind me.

Even in the dark and the rain, I can tell with how he slightly stumbles that the subject may be more complicated than that.

"Well, not like that," he says, trying to laugh it off. "She's a good friend. Likes to boss me around!"

Is that all?

"But be honest," he changes the subject. "You met a version of me from the future, didn't you?"

This time I stumble a bit.

"Is it that obvious?" I chuckle while I recover my footing. The meddler has always been perceptive and one would think that I'd be prepared by now.

"It's not that it's obvious, but it keeps happening to me!" He explains. "I get complete strangers coming up to me to either ask why I cut my hair or try to arrest me under suspicions of something I have no idea what they're talking about! So which is it for you? I'm curious!"

Cut his hair? Well, yeah I guess I do remember the mullet he was sporting. Wonder why he ended up growing it out.

"I'm afraid there isn't much to tell," I say as I lead him under a shop's awning to pause for some shelter from the wet. "I was lost myself and you pulled me aside to buy me lunch. You gave me a map."

Lunch that I couldn't eat, a map of a world not my own, and some advice I didn't think I would care for. But he doesn't need to know everything right out the gate.

"I bought you lunch?!" He gasps before bumping a fist in the air. "Yes! That means I'm going come into some money at some point! The future is bright after all!"

His voice echoes through the rain above the ghosts. A blip of light in the pitch black world that lingers longer than it has any right to.  
It prompts the notion of being watched, and I must be smiling, because I feel it tug down as my suspicion rises.  
We sprint back out through the downpour, I glance up and around at windows as we pass them, looking for reflections, for phantoms, for prying eyes looking for the source of the noise.

I recall the constraints the meddler mentioned to me; his precious eight minutes to be out and about and the kind of company he would always eventually draw.  
The thought occurs to me to warn Jaq now, to say "maybe not," but his hopes sound so high that nothing leaves my mouth.

I will spend sleepless weeks wondering if that's a mistake.

Erusea elementary is as normal as they come in terms of public education; good foundation, decent security and staff, okay student body, not the worst place parents could drop off the little ones for six and a half hours when tutoring gets too expensive.  
Not that I don't get the appeal. Hiring a nanny that can show a kid how to understand calculus is expensive after all, and while one-on-one sessions with a singular teacher are great for ensuring that learning is happening, it only does so much to develop social skills. Environment's too controlled.

What was I saying?

Oh, yeah.

Erusea is normal enough, with one key exception; pending the first ever victory against the Maverick Sigma, artists were commissioned to create memorials for the lives lost in the bloodshed, with high hopes that history wouldn't repeat.

Without getting into the disappointment of how much history was all too happy to repeat a few times over, this artist in particular had an interesting approach to the matter, choosing to focus on the time the fighting began.  
Apparently Sigma had initiated the first missile strike at what was exactly noon in Abel city, Japan, which was all the information the artist cared about. Whoever he was, he decided for the project that he would make two clocks; one that could only show the hour when a madman changed the world, and one that would never show the hour at all, as with it, Sigma had stolen whatever future could have been.

Obviously, the latter was here in Denver, while it's twin stood in front of Maverick hunter HQ all the way in Abel city.

Probably.

It's nothing noticable if one doesn't know the history behind the piece, and ironically I almost run past it in my paranoid hurry to find it.

I hear Jaq skid to a stop behind me so he can catch his breath while I approach the clock post.  
My eyes start from the top, processing the reflections of light from the emergency flood lamps maybe a block behind me and the silhouette the post strikes against the rainy backdrop. The face itself reads as 1:57a.m., and part of me kind of gawks at that.

"You're up late," I hear in my head. "Pulling another all nighter?"

"As I always do," I think right back. "And you're up just as late, your majesty~"

I follow the rain down the post and realize that there's some wording pressed into the metal. Getting closer, I squint and run a finger over the letters.  
It reads:  
"The right thing to guide us is right here inside us. No one can divide us when the light is nearly gone. But, just like a heartbeat, the drumbeat carries on."

Guess the creator was a Nickelback fan.

"... This what you're after?" I ask, leaning back to see Jaq's reaction.

He's got a jaw hanging open and his holographic map in front of him, eyes flicking back and forth between the map and the clock.

"Yeah! Yeah, that's it!" he exclaims eventually.  
Jaq zooms out a little and uses a finger to continue the path from the middle of the road, around a bend, straight, then an immediate left that led to the clock, marking it with a circle before closing the map and approaching me.

"Thanks for the help," he nods before he makes a face. "uh... Wait, we weren't actually introduced, were we?"

I purse my lips and feel my eyebrows shoot up.

"Well no," I admit. Knew that I was forgetting something.

Jaq laughs awkwardly and gives a cough into a fist before clearing his throat and shaking his wet hair around.

"Mind my manners," he apologizes when the brown nest on his head is presentable enough and he offers me his prosthetic hand. "Pleased to have the luck of your aquatintence, from yours truly, Jaq the map maker."

I squint at 'luck', but I smile cooly and give his hand a firm little shake.

"... I don't believe in luck, but the honor and pleasure is mine." I say before bowing my head respectfully. "Over, at your service."

His left eyebrow quirks up at my name and his smile grows, then abruptly shrinks to no longer meet his eyes.

"Well, Over. It's was a pleasure meeting you," he says, face falling ever so slightly as he hesitantly lets go of my hand. "Thanks for your help, really."

Now that's the meddler's more serious face if I've ever seen it.

"Something wrong?" I ask, concerned.

A sheepish grimace wipes across his visage and he looks around, considering.

"Well," he begins. "Time travel isn't a job you get into for the funsies or because it pays well. So..." he meets my eye line and gives a nod. 

"Whatever you're looking for, or whoever it is you're trying to save, I hope you succeed."

It hits me, damn near knocks the wind out of me, and it fucking shows.

The metaphorical heart in the cavity of my titanium chest soars in a way I haven't felt in I don't even know how long. Jumps like a frog into my throat and I turn away from him with fingers twisted into the fibers of my soaked collar, chin tucked down and eyes pressed painfully shut. It's wet and it hurts, but I force myself to suck in a breath of air through my nose and slowly blow it out through the mouth.

In, hold on for a second, out.

My sister always told me that.  
She didn't tell me everything I know, but she did teach me how to breathe.

In, hold it for a second, out.

I swallow the tension as best as I can manage and then peek an eye open to make sure he's still there.

Thankfully, he is. Jaq's standing patiently with a sympathetic little smile and sad eyes. His left hand reaches over to grip his prosthetic wrist, rubbing the metal with a thumb.

Time travel is dangerous and thankless work, yes, and he knows it too.

"... Thank you." I say when I can breathe without monitoring it. "That...That means a lot."

"I had a feeling it might," he admits, tipping his head down at that false hand before raising and waving it at me. "Take care. I'll see you whenever, Over."

Guess it's time for him to get going. We both have work.

"Sure," I agree, letting go of my collar to wave back. "See you whenever, meddler."

He gives one more smile and walks past the clock post... Only to not appear on the other side of it.  
I blink and look around at the direction he was walking.  
Nothing.

I run a lap around the post looking around for his shape.  
Nothing.

"Is that how it works?" I think aloud with hands on my hips, looking up and down at the face and at the post.

Wait, if there's one here, then is there another 'fold' next to the one in Abel city?

"I thought I told you to forget about him." A posh voice grumbles from behind me.

I twitch and whirl around, buster drawn. Standing in the road is an older man in dark clothing with a rifle resting on his shoulder and a hat on his head. His face is a mess of beard and unkept hair poking out from under that tattered old fedora, preventing me from seeing his eyes. His posture is sort of relaxed, but ready to move; something I don't trust.

But... There is something familiar here.

Fedora, rifle, posh voice.  
Posh voice, rifle, fedora.  
Rifle, posh voice, fedora.  
Posh voice, fedora, rifle, where have I seen this guy before?!

Forget. Forget. Fedora says forget-

Oh.

Bastard.

"And I thought I told You to let me worry about what I decide to get myself into, good sir." I say coldly.

He tips his head up and gives me a big, wide stare. It's not quite deer in the headlights, but he sure looks surprised. Neither of us move for a few more seconds before he huffs out a tired, rumbling laugh.

"Damn," Lance chortles. "So you did."

I give him a scan with my eyes again, taking stock while he's being harmless.

It's puzzling.

Last I saw of him, Lance was picture perfect and tighter than a noose.   
The hat ribbon is gone, which I realize first. Then, mind the rain but I don't think that suit has been pressed in years. He's even missing the green tie.

"... You look terrible." I say matter of factly when his laughing quiets down.

"You've scarcely changed," he replies, shifting on his feet.

Maybe it bugs me a little that his reactions have been to what I'm saying, as opposed to having a gun pointed at him, and yeah, it's raining and my buster is heavy enough, so I carefully point my weapon down at the ground, raising my off hand a little bit to see if he means anything with that rifle on his shoulder.

"Well, I'm a robot. We're not supposed to change." I say in the meantime.

He gets my message with a sideways tilt of his head, flicking his eyes to the gun and back before shrugging it away from its resting spot and deliberately pointing the barrel down. After, Lance brings up his other hand, catching the droplets in his palm and letting them pool over his fingers.

"What do you do about rust then?"

The way he asks is weird.

And when I say weird, I mean that I've been to the most colorful peanut gallery of wacky places where both aliens and magic appear to be real, and I've not once been asked by a wizard to answer some kind of riddle.

Until now apparently.

At face value, the question is innocent enough; relevant, with the weather and what water does to metal, ergo me. But I seriously doubt he's asking literally. 

I scan him up and down again and think about it.

"What do you do about rust?"

There's probably something symbolic that he means.

Rust  
(Noun)  
1.a reddish- or yellowish-brown flaky coating of iron oxide that is formed on iron or steel by oxidation, especially in the presence of moisture.

2\. a state of deterioration or disrepair resulting from neglect or lack of use.

Wait.

"Deterioration"

Just wait...

This is Lance.  
Now, I didn't know Lance, not well, but even I can tell that the passage of time has done things to him.

He's old now.

Possibly mid fifties, missing his tie, sporting an old beat up hat and overgrown hair. I shudder to think of the state of his shoes.  
Not at all the prim young man I met at Prehistoric Park.

If anything, Lance is emulating the careless, or carefree, energy of the Meddler.

And then there's Jaq as the meddler who hadn't met me before tonight.  
How old was he just now? Mid twenties? Maybe late twenties?

Thirty at the oldest.

Versus when I first met him... Most likely as a forty-something, maybe fifty-something year old man with an overgrown mullet of hair, damaged armor, unabashedly exposed prosthetic limb.

Is that how it is?

Lance tilts his hand sideways and lets the liquid fall, not breaking his own silence.  
He doesn't blink, doesn't move other than that.

Oh...

He already knows.

Of course, why wouldn't he?  
I'm overthinking his question.  
He's not asking what I know about him, he's asking about me.

How do I fit?  
I'm older than Jaq is right now, but I've "scarcely changed."

Time beats these men down and leaves them to deteriorate in a cycle of running around each other in a loop.  
But what about me?

What do I do about "rust"?

"... Machine won't rust if you take care of it." I answer finally.

I kinda see his eyes widen and he raises his chin a little before shrugging and shaking the wet off his hand.

"... Indeed," Lance says absently as he reaches for his vest pocket.   
He pulls out a familiar silver pocket watch that shines as though it's still new, which, personally, I raise an eyebrow at.  
Of all the things on him he kept maintained, the watch won the draw?  
Does that mean..?  
What does that mean?

"So take care of yourself, Over." He says as he clicks the accessory open. "And fret not."

Thunder crackles above us and the watch shines brighter than naturally possible. I raise my buster again, paranoid that there's some kind of attack because that usually happens when shit starts glowing.

Lance doesn't respond. All he does is look up from his watch.

"The fault lies not with you."

Lightning strikes either him, or right behind him. I can't tell either way, seeing as the flash turns everything in sight stark white, and I have to cover my eyes to avoid damaging my optic sensors.

Thunder rumbles around and I blink my vision back only to find Lance gone.  
I look around to my sides, behind me, and back to where he was just standing.

Nothing.

My teeth chatter from a bit of electrical aftershock as well as the cold rain when I point my buster down and stroke my collar again.

"That... Was weird." I hear myself say. And, yeah, weird is the word for it.

Wait. When the hell did I tell him my name? I don't think I did.  
Did I?

No, I didn't. Not before, and not now, either. Does that mean I'm going to meet him again sometime?  
When? How?  
And what the hell did he mean?!

"The fault lies not with you."

What fault is he talking about?!

Is this another "rust" riddle?!

"Damn vague time travel mumbo jumbo!" I growl with a shake of my head.

It was nice to see Jaq again, but why is it that Lance has to suck the joy out of these exchanges?

Oh hell if I know.

While I'm pulling myself back together, something else rumbles through the air. Not laughter, nor thunder, but something bigger. The wind picks up and blows the rain every which way except up and I feel myself tense when it happens.

I look back up at the clock to see that it's now about 2:05, and my blood runs cold.

If it's past two in the morning, then that means Eurasia has one hour left to either fall or explode and, regardless of what ends up happening, I need to be there when it does.

I suck in a breath and clench my fists, going over my plan of action in my head. I've already made most of the necessary preparations by this point, I just need one extra thing or two and I'll be good to go. This little endeavor has barely put me behind sche- no, scratch that, it hasn't put me behind schedule at all, I can feel it.

I open my eyes and prepare myself, sparing the clock one last glance before I go.

"... And the drumbeat carries on." I say with a smile and a salute.

Yeah, the drumbeat carries on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boy that took forever. Hope everyone had a nice Valentine's day.

**Author's Note:**

> Shrödinger's fanfiction; wherein a posted work simultaneously is, and is not, part of an ongoing series by the author.
> 
> I know what someone's asking, "Where's part 2 of concurrent sentence and aiding and abetting? You said you'd have it out soon!"
> 
> Some drama came up, don't worry about it. Soon.
> 
> Yes.... Soon.


End file.
